A Message from my Mother (Forty-Five Years Later)

A couple of years ago I was going through a particularly difficult time in my life.  We were undergoing a basement renovation, my husband was on crutches and unable to drive due to a pulled Achilles tendon, and I had just suffered a traumatic second-trimester miscarriage with our third child.

One day not long after the miscarriage I was having a terrible day.  I was a mess, the children were a mess, our loss was a fresh wound, and I felt like a failure as a mother--both to my living children and to the child we had lost.  I felt lonely. I missed my mother, who died in 2001.  In the midst of all this, Annie (who was 2) was walking around with a paper that looked like this:

I could not identify what it was or where she'd gotten it, but when I took it from her I realized it was a little drawing my mother had done years ago, when she was in college and writing her parents. Then I opened it up, and found a little card-

And then I opened that little card and found the message that I think I was supposed to receive in my own mother's handwriting.  Way back in the late 1960s, she had written--

I had not seen my mother in twelve and a half years, but she still encouraged me that day.  And this note she sent to her own mother 45 years ago was presented to me by my own daughter. Four generations of women were interconnected by this card, which was given to me on one of my hardest days. 

I will treasure this note forever.